As long as you look for someone else to validate who you are by seeking their approval, you are setting yourself up for disaster. You have to be whole and complete in yourself. No one can give you that. You have to know who you are – what others say is irrelevant.
I am figuring out which parts of my personality are mine and which ones I created to please you.
I have already lost touch with a couple of people I used to be…
Everybody is half-dead. Everybody avoids everybody. All over the place…in most situations, most of the time. I know I’m one of those everybodys. And to me it is terrible. And so all I’m trying to do, all the time, is just to open people up so they can feel themselves and let themselves be open to somebody else. That is all. That’s it.
You have to act as if it were possible to radically transform the world. And you have to do it all the time.
Remember, you have been criticizing yourself for years and it hasn’t worked. Try approving of yourself and see what happens.
(via herdirtylittleheart)
And I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, ‘If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.
Healing is a choice. It is not an easy one because it takes work to turn around your habits. But keep making the choice and shifts will happen.
I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a “more convenient season.” Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.
Martin Luther King, Jr., “Letter from a Birmingham Jail”
Only MLK quote I’m entertaining for the day. If you can’t get down with this MLK, the forgotten, less cheery-hand-holding MLK, then don’t come at me about what my relationship to his legacy should be and why I should be a pacifist.
(via evolutia)
“Freedom is not something that anybody can be given. Freedom is something people take, and people are as free as they want to be” –
James Baldwin, Freedom Fighter